Lavinia loses her limited power not completely by the hands of a men – Demetrius and Chiron- but also by Tamora, a fellow woman. Lavinia pleads to Tamora to kill her instead of allowing her to be raped. But, she has her power and dignity taken away when Tamora not only allowed but also encouraged her sons to do what they will with Lavinia. She is not only raped but also mutilated by Demetrius and Chiron. She is left with absolutely no power even despite her royal familial line. As a result of the incident Lavinia is tainted and no longer pure. The importance of women and their purity is held so high that she would rather die than live with having been raped. Lavinia pleads to Tamora to have mercy on her, “O Tamora, be call'd a gentle queen, …show more content…
Her first step to regaining power is that she was to be married to the new emperor Saturninus. She compels Saturninus into marrying her by saying, “If Saturnine advance the queen of Goths/She will a handmaid be to his desires.” (Shakespeare, 1.1.3). She uses the seductive idea of sex to convince Saturninus to marry her. This marriage once again gives her back the original power she had as the Queen of Goths and it a level of power she needs in order to succeed with her other plans. Now she is fueled by revenge and seeks more power in order to overthrow and ruin Titus. She dresses up as revenge and intimidates Titus into doing what she wants. She convinces Saturninus that she has a plan to get rid of Titus and for him to simply go along with what she has in mind. Tamora used Aaron’s feelings for her to her own advantage. Aaron’s feelings for Tamora and his desire to see her have power and control was a contributing factor to all the terrible deeds and crimes that Aaron committed. Aaron describes Tamora’s advancement of power, “Now climbeth Tamora Olympus' top,/ Safe out of fortune's shot; and sits aloft,/ Secure of thunder's crack or lightning flash;/ Advanced above pale envy's threatening reach./ As when the golden/ sun salutes the morn,/ And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,/ Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,/And overlooks the highest-peering hills;/ So Tamora: …show more content…
Tamora takes the only power Lavinia has, her purity and virginity, by allowing her sons to rape her. The bond between women is not strong enough compared to the allure of revenge. Lavinia was in the same position as Tamora once was, pleading to someone with more power than themselves begging for the person in power to show mercy. Tamora was not granted mercy and she did not give any out. This similar act further shows that Tamora has gone from a powerless woman to a woman with power and control over not only a situation but another’s life, just like a man has. She takes her power a step further by saying, “Farewell, my sons: see that you make her sure./ Ne'er let my heart know merry cheer indeed, / Till all the Andronici be made away. / Now will I hence to seek my lovely Moor, /And let my spleenful sons this trull deflow'r.”(Shakespeare, 2,3). She enjoys the control she has over what will happen to Lavinia. The more damage done to Lavinia, the more power and value that is ripped away from the young girl, means the more that Chiron and Demetrius love their mother in Tamora’s
The story of Lucretia begins with men boasting about their wives, trying to determine who is the best of them all. It is clear to them that Lucretia is the winner when she is found “hard at work by lamplight upon her spinning” (Livy, 100). She then moves on to be a gracious host to all of these men, again showing success in her womanly duties. Later that night one of the visitors, Sextus Tarquinis, comes into her room, and forces himself upon her, telling her that if she does not comply he will make it look like she had an affair with on of the servants (Livy, 101). She yields to him because she does not want it to seem as if she had an affair and n...
One way in which Medieval women were undermined and subjugated to men was by being painted as untrustworthy temptresses, and the lady in Laustic, the unnamed lover in Lanval, and the Queen in Lanval are all portrayed as temptresses. For instance, the lady in Laustic spends all night looking over at her lover. She cannot go to the castle next door to see her lover, so instead, all night “The lady, at her window, higher,/Speaks, and looks, only desire.” From this passage we can see the sexual undertones of the story, with lady looking with desire at her lover. Elsewhere it explains that “They had all they wanted, at their leisure,/Except coming together alone, you know,/And going as far as they'd like to go,” clearly indicating the overt sexual nature of the woman’s desire for her lover and his for her. Lanval’s unnamed lover is even more overtly sexual, appearing scantily clad. The first time we meet her, the story tells, “In just ...
While Clytemnestra’s crime would be violent and shocking to the Argive men and to the Greek audience, her motivations for murdering her husband are not completely incomprehensible and are not without some roots in justice. After stabbing the king, Clytemnestra draws the chorus’ attention back to the other murder witnessed earlier in the play: the...
The power that Lavinia has is not like Tamora’s, which is traditionally masculine. Lavinia’s power is in her femininity. She is able to attract the attention of many men, including Demetrius and Chiron, Tamora’s sons. At one point, Chiron is begging Demetrius to let him have Lavinia saying that he will “plead my passions for Lavinia’s love” (2.1.36). It does not matter to these two men that Lavinia is married; she is still just as attractive to them. Lavinia has the power to attract these men to her by her femininity, but she is not able to ward off their attack because her power is limited to being feminine, not being strong and convincing, like
The time is the sixth century, the place is Rome and the person is Lucretia, a woman who contributed to one of the biggest parts of Roman history: the creation of the Roman republic. The rape of the virtuous Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of Tarquinius Superbus' (an Etruscan king) was the final straw for the Roman people and pushed them to want to change from a monarchy to a republic. From the accounts of the rape of Lucretia from ancient historians like Livy, Cicero and Dionysius, it is clear that Lucretias rape not only spurred the roman people to want to get rid of the Etruscan King and his family, but also revealed the important role of virtue in women in roman society.
Shakespeare's sources for the play are quite clear. He makes it no secret that the rape of Lavinia is analogous to the rape of Philomela in Ovid's Metamorphosis. In this tale, The daughter of the King of Athens, Procne, marries the King of Thrace, Tereus, and the two of them have a son, Itys. After a number of years, Procne desperately wishes to see her sister, Philomela, and sends Tereus back to Athens to bring her to Thrace. When Tereus sees Philomela, he becomes obsessed with her and carries her into the forest, rapes her and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. Upon returning to Thrace, he informs his wife that Philomela is dead. In the meantime, Philomela weaves her story into a cloth and sends it to Procne. Procne becomes so enraged by this knowledge that she and Philomela plot and kill Itys, cook his flesh and serve it to Tereus. He discovers their ploy and tries to kill them, but Philomela is changed into a nightingale, Procne a swallow and Tereus a hoopoe (Bullough, vi. 48-58).
In the taming of the shrew, the play focused on two women in particular, Baptista's daughters, Bianca and Katherine. These women lived in this environment that gave men power for all their lives...
“Lysistrata” is a tale which is centered around an Athenian woman named Lysistrata and her comrades who have taken control of the Acropolis in Athens. Lysistrata explains to the old men how the women have seized the Acropolis to keep men from using the money to make war and to keep dishonest officials from stealing the money. The opening scene of “Lysistrata” enacts the stereotypical and traditional characterization of women in Greece and also distances Lysistrata from this overused expression, housewife character. The audience is met with a woman, Lysistrata, who is furious with the other women from her country because they have not come to discuss war with her. The basic premise of the play is, Lysistrata coming up with a plan to put an end to the Peloponnesian War which is currently being fought by the men. After rounding up the women, she encourages them to withhold sex until the men agree to stop fighting. The women are difficult to convince, although eventually they agree to the plan. Lysistrata also tells the women if they are beaten, they may give in, since sex which results from violence will not please the men. Finally, all the women join Lysistrata in taking an oath to withhold sex from their mates. As a result of the women refraining from pleasing their husbands until they stop fighting the war, the play revolves around a battle of the sexes. The battle between the women and men is the literal conflict of the play. The war being fought between the men is a figurative used to lure the reader to the actual conflict of the play which is the battle between men and women.
Laertes is greatly influenced by revenge for his actions especially when he is seeking revenge for his sister. He shows his brotherly love for Ophelia when he says “For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor,/Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,/A violet in the youth of primy nature,/Forward, not permanent, sweet, not
She seems to believe that manhood is the ability to perform acts of “direst cruelty” without remorse. Throughout the play we see that she worries her husband will not be man enough to do what she and him deem necessary to attain the throne. “Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness . . .” She says. Constantly we see her telling her husband to “man up” - to stop feeling remorse or guilt or fear and to start behaving like she believes a man should; like a being with no guilt or remorse. However, it is this wish for her to lose all “passage to remorse” that eventuates in her death - her corruption - from the madness that comes upon her i...
During the Shakespearean time women were treated as inferiors. The three women in Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca encountered many degrading and unfortunate situations. They were to be obedient. The women had to comply with the commands, orders, and the instructions of the men. Women were made to believe that they had no rights. The men would publicly humiliate the three women. It was difficult for the women to stand up for themselves due to that time in society. In Shakespeare’s play Othello, he portrayed the three women to be viewed as obedient, loyal, and submissive to their husbands.
Medea shows this by masterfully manipulating those around her so that no one, save the chorus whom she convinces not to intervene, is able to see her true intentions until it is too late. Her determination comes into play when she decides to kill her children, whom she greatly values. Phaedra’s cunning is less obvious, but still present. She is able to devise a way for her to maintain her good reputation although her lust for Hippolytus had already been revealed. Phaedra’s determination comes into play when, in carrying out this plan, not only does she end her own life, but she also ends the life of Hippolytus. It is also important to point out that if Artemis had not relayed the truth of the matter to Theseus, Phaedra’s plan would have succeeded. The cunning in these leading female characters show that the Greeks knew that women can be intelligent. In fact, they feared this intelligence. In both of these plays, the females’ cunning is used to ruin the men around them. In Medea, Jason loses everything, the king and his daughter both die, and so do Medea’s male sons. In Phaedra, Hippolytus dies and Theseus loses his only son. Meanwhile, the only mortal woman to incur any suffering in this play is Phaedra herself, and she chooses her final fate. This theme is so obvious that Hippolytus points it out himself. “But a clever woman—that I loathe! … For Cypris engenders more mischief in the clever ones.” (Hippolytus, Lines
In his novel, Othello, he uses the courage of the women in his literature to depict how women should be treated, and to contrast from how little respect they once obtained. The society in Shakespeare’s Othello is strongly dominated by men who were the political and military leaders of their homeland during the Elizabethan era. These men are expected to stay loyal to their reputations and to uphold the strong sense of character that earned them their positions in the first place. In contrast, during the Elizabethan period of time women were viewed as weak second-class citizens and inferior to males, with their only job being to serve their men.
In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period. Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry. The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity. The second fears and mistrusts them for their (usually fantasized) infidelity, an infidelity that requires their actual or temporary elimination from the world of men, which then re-forms [sic] itself around the certainty of men’s shared victimization (Neely 127).
Along with protecting his sister from the unlawful Hamlet, Laertes tries to protect the family’s reputation. He believes that Hamlet is to out manipulate his daughter and if he doesn’t put an end to it, entire family will be ruined. Other royals will begin to look down the family if the secrets and between Hamlet and Ophelia are ever